Tag Archives: BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

Nothing remains of this former mansion; the only reminder of its existence is the balustrading which once encircled the garden at the front of the house.

The exact date of Aston Clinton House, and who built it, are unknown but it was sometime between 1770, when a house called Church Farm was still the manor house, and 1793 when, on the plans for a proposed canal a house was marked as ‘seat of General Gerard Lake’. Image: Lost Heritage.

The age of opulence. In October 1902, The Sketch visited Aston Clinton House, to the south-east of the village of Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire, thought to have been the most charming of the country houses belonging to various members of the Rothschild family and their immediate descendants. As one observer said: “This typically English homestead gains rather than loses by contrast with its stately neighbour, Waddesdon.”

The long, low white building was unpretentious in general design, and had been bought in 1851 by Sir Anthony de Rothschild from a well-known Aylesbury banker. Both the house and the estate had been improved and altered; but the general appearance of the fine old square manor had not been altered, and the additions were charmingly picturesque, while the views from the windows commanded the loveliest prospects.

Sir Anthony Nathan de Rothschild (1810-1876) was the third child and second son of Nathan Mayer Rothschild and Hanna Barent Cohen, and had worked for N.M. Rothschild & Sons in London as well de Rothschild Frères in Paris and M. A. Rothschild Söhne in Frankfurt. In 1840 he married Louise Montefiore (1821-1910), a cousin, and daughter of Abraham Montefiore and Henriette Rothschild.

Aston Clinton House in 1902. The Buckinghamshire seat of Lord and Lady Battersea. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.

Sir Anthony and his wife Louisa made alterations from 1853 using the architectural talents of George Henry Stokes, assistant of Joseph Paxton, and using the builder George Myers. Extensions to the existing house included a ‘billiard room building’, dining room, offices and a conservatory. Between 1864 and 1877, they turned to the steady work of George Devey who designed the park gates and various cottages on the estate.

Back in 1902, Constance Flower, Lady Battersea (1843-1931), the only surviving child of Sir Anthony, and his widow, the venerable chatelaine of Aston Clinton, were interested in gardening, long before horticulture had become a fashionable hobby; accordingly, the gardens of Aston Clinton were full of rare and interesting plants and shrubs. Fortunately, Cyril Flower, 1st Baron Battersea (1843-1907), was as keen a horticulturist as was his wife, and both at The Pleasaunce, their other property at Overstrand, Norfolk, and at Aston Clinton, he had given up much time and thought to the practical beautifying of the grounds.

The interior of Aston Clinton was arranged in an artistic and original manner. The rooms weren’t large, but a corridor connecting the principal apartments was full of objets d’art, collected by the Rothschilds. Particularly beautiful was the china, arranged in such a fashion that it added to the artistic effect, instead of, as was too often the case, detracting from it.

After Gerard Lake’s death in 1808 his son Francis Gerard (1772-1836) inherited the title and the estate and used the house as his country residence. Francis died in 1836 without heirs and the title and estate passed to his younger brother Warwick (1783-1848). Image: Lost Heritage.

Lady de Rothschild’s boudoir was hung with fine tapestries, and the white panelling in the dining room had been carved by a sixteenth-century Dutch artist. The drawing-room contained more fine works of art, worthy of inclusion in any world-famous collection, and among hundreds of curios was an old clock showing a mighty Sovereign walking in a procession, while above his head waved a Royal umbrella.

According to the commentator in The Sketch, “Pictures were here, there and everywhere, sharing the space with books, etchings and prints.” Sir Anthony Rothschild had been a generous patron of painters and etchers, and had been ready to back his own taste, a love of creative art that was shared by his son-in-law Lord Battersea, whose study at Aston Clinton contained a remarkable series of amateur photographs, several watercolours and engravings, each chosen with reference to their intrinsic interest or artistic value.

A feature at Aston Clinton was a splendid winter-garden (conservatory) which had been arranged in such a manner that it became part of the long corridor already mentioned. ‘Lady de Rothschild, bringing, as it were, the varied delights of leaf, fruit, and blossom into the house itself’.

Aston Clinton House in 1902. The Conservatory and North Wing. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.

Both Lady Battersea and her mother showed a practical interest in the welfare of their poorer neighbours. Anthony Hall, a building erected by Sir Anthony’s widow in memory to him, formed a centre not only for those in the neighbourhood, but also for the many practical philanthropists who met there at the invitation of Lord Battersea. The Aston Clinton Coffee Tavern was another familiar benefaction conferred on the village by the Rothschild family, and successful had been the Training Home for Girls, an institution that had solved locally ‘that difficult modern problem – the servant question’.

Both were keenly concerned in what was going on in the political, artistic, and philanthropic worlds. The Sketch painted a lavish, if not saccharine, portrayal. “They are among those whom the nation should delight to honour, for they have done all in their power to make happier and better the many large circles of human beings with whom they are brought in contact. Lady Battersea has the energy of her wonderful race, and she is ardently interested in all that affects the welfare of her own sex.”

When Lady de Rothschild died in 1910, Aston Clinton reverted to the Rothschild estate, but Lady Battersea and her sister, Annie Henrietta (1844-1926), remained in occupation until the First World War. It was given over to the Commanding Officer of the 21st Infantry Division, then based on the Halton estate.

The Rothschild estate sold Aston Clinton for £15,000 in 1923 – a house with seven reception rooms, billiard room, ballroom, thirteen principal bedrooms and dressing rooms, seventeen secondary and servants’ bedrooms, four bathrooms and domestic offices. To commemorate the sale the Rothschilds placed a tablet in the wall of the portico recording that the family had owned Aston Clinton between 1853 until 1923, a period of 70 years.

The country house was bought by Dr Albert Edward Bredin Crawford who used the house as a school for boys. Evelyn Waugh was a schoolmaster for a short time from 1925, and in his diaries he referred to it as “an unconceivably ugly house but a lovely park” and “a house of echoing and ill-lit passages.”

Aston Clinton House in 1902. A charming pool in the grounds. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.

After a brief period as the Aston Clinton Country Club in 1931, the house was on the market again the following year and described as being suitable for a club, school or institution.

Aston Clinton became the Howard Park Hotel in 1933, ‘a first-class country hotel’ complete with a landing strip for aeroplanes. It was run by Mr Stanley Cecil Howard, the son of a well-known hotelier, and had studied hotel improvement across the world. (The house itself was owned by Charles Richard Stirling of Sysonby Lodge, Melton Mowbray, and was rented on a five-year lease). Howard had trained as a hotel manager and a restaurateur in Paris and Dusseldorf and had been the general manager of the Royal Hotel in Scarborough.

The Howard Park Hotel was a business failure and became the Green Park Hotel in 1938, run by Douglas Haslett of Surrey. The curtain came down on Stanley Howard’s career when he was declared bankrupt in 1939. (The ownership of the house had since transferred from Richard Stirling to Stanley Howard; on his bankruptcy it was seized by H.M. Treasury before being sold to Thames Side Property Developments Ltd).

Warwick Lake decided to sell the estate and put it up for sale in 1836. The sale attracted the attention of the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos but didn’t actually complete until 1838. It was later sold to Sir Anthony de Rothschild. Image: Lost Heritage.

The Green Park Hotel was more successful and survived until the late 1940s. During the Second World War it became the temporary headquarters for Oxo Ltd, while the stables were used by Eric Kirkham Cole for his Ecko Radio Company, which used them as offices and for the development of radar.

Buckinghamshire County Council bought the country house and land in three lots between 1959 and 1967. Aston Clinton House was demolished in 1956, and Green Park Training Centre eventually built in its place. The extended garden of Aston Clinton House is now incorporated into Green Park, while the stables survive as part of the training centre.

Aston Clinton House in 1902. One of the Entrance-Gates. Image: The British Newspaper Archive.The same view in modern-times. Very little remains of Aston Clinton House. This is now the entrance to Green Park.

Once there was a big country house that stood in 92-acres of beautiful parkland. However, in October 1936, The Sphere published photographs from Heatherden Hall, at Iver Heath, when it was about to change its existence forever. The house had been converted from a grand mansion into Britain’s newest and largest film studio. This Victorian house had been turned into a residential club for the stars and was about to enjoy an exciting and completely different future.

Heatherden, with its tree-lined driveway, was built about 1865 by Charles Frederick Reeks, who also designed St. Margaret’s Church at nearby Iver Heath. However, after the Canadian financier and later Conservative M.P. for Brentford and Chiswick) Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Grant Morden bought the property in 1914, he employed the architect Melville Seth-Ward to create the grand country house seen today.

These changes were made between 1914 and 1928 and included a huge ballroom, stone gallery, Turkish bath and a swimming pool, and were reputed to have cost £300,000. (Morden later claimed that the cost was actually between £20,000 and £25,000). The gardens to the south, with their serpentine paths, specimen trees, sunken garden, cascade and lake with ornamental bridge, were laid out at the same time.

In 1929, firemen fought a moorland blaze which threatened to destroy Heatherden Hall. The fire destroyed about 60 acres of grass and woodland. “The fire was about a quarter of a mile away, where some woods were ablaze. Fortunately the wind was north-west. Had it been west the flames would have been carried direct to the hall.”

Colonel Grant Morden was a Canadian, who came to England at the end of the 1890s with a big reputation, and combined business with politics after the war. He was born in Ontario in 1880, educated at the Collegiate Institute of Toronto, and in his business career he founded the British Commonwealth Union and Canada Steamship Lines Ltd. Before long he controlled over a hundred steamers and became interested in various timber and land companies. Morden also obtained the assets of all the cement companies in Canada, which resulted in the formation of the Canada Cement Company Ltd. He arrived in England to found a business for making office furniture and bookcases and became associated with no fewer than thirty-five companies, one of the biggest ventures being the flotation of the British Cellulose and Chemical Manufacturing Company, which eventually had a capital of £6 million. (It specialised in the manufacture of cloth dope used in aeroplane construction).

Morden had a distinguished career in World War One. He served as the personal staff officer to General Sam Hughes and operated in France as an airman, turning Heatherden Hall into a convalescent home for Canadian soldiers.

He combined his busy business life with a vigorous open-air life. Shooting and hunting were his favourite sports, and his hobbies included the breeding of horses and pedigree cattle. The magnificent grounds at Heatherden Hall contained tennis and squash courts and a golf course, which were threatened by a big forest fire in 1929. At one time he owned a yacht claimed to be the one of the best-equipped medium-sized yachts in existence. It had cost him £21,000 but was eventually sold by the bank for £4,000.

In 1931 Morden was declared bankrupt with total liabilities of £151,280. He told the London Bankruptcy Court how he had made and lost a fortune. He said he had been financially interested in over forty companies and in the big slump in securities in 1929 his shareholding greatly depreciated. At one time he had been reported as being a millionaire with household expenses in 1928 of £30,000 – by 1930 these had been reduced to £10,000. The bank seized his assets, including Heatherden Hall, and when Morden died, aged 52 in 1932, he was suffering from serious heart trouble and practically blind. He left just £10 in his will.

For a short time Heatherden Hall became a country club but in 1934 the estate was acquired by Charles Boot, head of the enormously successful Sheffield building firm of Henry Boot and Sons. He lived at Thornbridge Hall, Derbyshire, but the purchase of Heatherden had nothing to do with it becoming a family home.

Charles Boot (1874 – 1945). He was the eldest son of Henry Boot and the driving forced behind Henry Boot & Sons in the inter-war period. As well as creating one of the largest contracting and house-building firms of its time, he was a staunch advocate for better housing and the virtues of private rather than local authority housing. He was the creator of Pinewood Studios and his building firm constructed most of the facilities.

Boot’s dream was to establish a film studio that would rival those in Hollywood and make Britain a big film producer. He went off to Hollywood on a fact-finding mission and returned within months with plans to establish Pinewood as the studios we know today. Those plans were to cost more than £1 million and the first chairman of the company was the millionaire flour-miller and film entrepreneur Mr J. Arthur Rank.

The development of Pinewood Studios. The stages were modernly equipped as any in Hollywood and covered over 7 acres. Adjoining was the administrative block and residential club – Heatherden Hall – where there were eighty bedrooms available for those who wished to live near their work. (British Newspaper Archive).

Boot and Rank employed the architects A.F.B. Anderson and H.S. Scroxton to develop the parkland to the north of the house, called Pinewood (in Rank’s words, ‘because of the number of trees which grow there and because it seemed to suggest something of the American film centre in its second syllable’). The mansion was used as a residential club and a large administration block was built alongside the house. The studios opened in September 1936 and grew to become a mainstay of the British film industry, home of the Rank Organisation and the birthplace of hundreds of films including The Red Shoes (1947), The Ipcress File (1965), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and the James Bond and Carry On series. Heatherden Hall itself has frequently been used as a film location, as well as to accommodate visiting actors, directors and production staff.

Panelling from the Cunard liner, Mauretania, adorning the walls of the board room at the newly created Pinewood Studios , which had just opened at Iver, Buckinghamshire, and were being occupied by various film companies. (British Newspaper Archive).The Picture Gallery in the residential club, where there were many good examples of nineteenth century art. The club was in Heatherden Hall, originally built at a cost of £300,000 by Lieutenant-Colonel Grant Morden. (British Newspaper Archive).‘Mr Gladstone rides to Piccadilly in an old-time bus’: A canvas by Alfred Morgan which seldom failed to attract the attention of visitors to the Picture Gallery. It was dated 1885, when the great statesman was nearing the end of his long parliamentary career. (British Newspaper Archive).Where a hearth is at the threshold: The main entrance of the administrative offices was something of a curiosity, being formed from the elaborately carved oak fireplace adorned with hunting scenes and other designs. It was finished in 1568, and came to PInewood from Irlam Hall in Derbyshire. (British Newspaper Archive).The fireplace in what was now the Cocktail Bar, showed the following inscription: ‘In this room, on November 3, 1921, the ratification of the Irish Free State Treaty was settled by the Earl of Birkenhead, Viscount Long, Viscount Younger of Leckie, Sir Malcolm Fraser, Bart., and Lieut.-Colonel W. Grant Morden, J.P., M.P.’ (British Newspaper Archive).Millions of people have seen Heatherden Hall without actually knowing it. This scene is from ‘Carry on Nurse’ (1959) when the country house doubled as Haven Hospital. (British Film Locations).The final scene from ‘The Amazing Mr Blunden’ (1972) when Heatherden Hall was put to good use. In the same film it was also made to look fire-damaged and derelict. (Final Image/Blogspot).Pinewood Studios today. The film and television studio is at Iver Heath, about 4 miles from Slough, 2 miles from Uxbridge and about 17 miles west of central London.

Shardeloes .These days the Georgian mansion has been split into apartments. (Savills)

Shardeloes is a magnificent Grade I listed building of special architectural and historic interest set in around 50 acres of parkland grounds overlooking a lake and Misbourne valley on the edge of Amersham Old Town. The present mansion was once the ancestral home of the Tyrwhitt-Drake family. The Lord of the Manor, William Drake, had the house built between 1758 and 1766, mainly designed by Stiff Leadbetter from Eton who was among a group of architects responding to changing fashion within Country Houses. Wanting the latest décor Drake engaged the rising architect Robert Adam to complete much of the decoration and plasterwork. Further interior work was carried out by James Wyatt from 1773. The house was finally built of stuccoed brick, one and a half storeys high, with a top balustrade and a grand pedimented portico of stone, with Corinthian columns and pilasters.

When the Old Berkeley met at Shardeloes in December 1928, the movie-cameras were present in force, for the occasion formed part of the Gaumont film, ‘The Devil’s Maze’. For the purposes of the picture, Mr.E. T. Tyrwhitt-Drake was superseded by Mr Davy Burnaby, who figured in the film as the Master of the Foxhounds. (The British Newspaper Archive)

Shardeloes was back in front of the camera in November 1929. ‘Making a sound-film for America of an English meet of foxhounds. The Paramount Pictures camera-man at work at Shardeloes’. (The British Newspaper Archive)

The Tyrwhitt Drake family fortunes declined in the 19th and 20th centuries and the house was auctioned off in the 1930s. It was requisitioned as a maternity home at the outbreak of World War II. Uninhabited and neglected by 1953 the newly formed Amersham Society fought for preservation and prevented its demolition. Subsequently the house and its adjoining stable block were beautifully and sympathetically restored and converted into apartments and houses, at first rented and then sold in the 1970s, with all owners sharing the freehold for 999 years.

Shardeloes in 1911. The residence of Mr W. Twrwhitt-Drake, Joint Master of the Old Berkeley (West) Hunt. He was said to cherish cushions that were left at the house by Queen Elizabeth on the occasion of her stay there. (The British Newspaper Archive)June 1940. Shardeloes, home of the Drake family, had descended in direct male line, from the Great Admiral, who had once been one of England’s sheet-anchors, and, during the Squire’s days, was a fox-hunting centre. The squire ‘Teddy’ Drake was Master or Joint-Master of the Old Berkeley from 1921 to 1931. He died in 1933 and was appropriately buried at sea. Shardeloes was one of the first houses decorated by Robert Adam, and in 1940 was home to Captain Thomas and Mrs Tyrwhitt-Drake, whose family had owned it since the early part of the 17th century. It was offered to the Ministry of Health as a maternity hospital for evacuee mothers, and on the outbreak of war it was converted within 12 hours – the furniture stored in two rooms, the pictures removed and the wall spaces labelled, the library boarded up and provision made for 50 beds. In addition to supervising the gardens at Shardeloes (they were living nearby in Amersham), Mrs Tyrwhitt-Drake was Deputy President of the Buckinghamshire branch of the British Red Cross Society and the organiser of hospital supplies for Mid-Bucks. This image showed the general approach to Shardeloes. (The British Newspaper Archive)The Drawing-Room was one of the largest wards after it was converted into a maternity hospital. (The British Newspaper Archive)The Orangery, dating back to 1790, a perfect spot for convalescing patients. (The British Newspaper Archive)The Dining-Room was converted into the Medical Stores with the lady Doctor in charge. (The British Newspaper Archive)Shardeloes was the home of the great sporting family, the Tyrwhitt-Drakes, who had been an household word in all branches of sport. In horse racing they were dominant and the stables provided a home to trainer Sam Bennet’s ponies, seen here going out for morning exercise. (The British Newspaper Archive)

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COUNTRY HOUSES WITH A STORY TO TELL

Our country houses have a story to tell. From the time they were constructed to the present day.

This site provides an insight into their glory days and how changes in society affected them.

We look at country houses being offered on the market and investigate their history. There are snapshots in time, when certain events influenced their existence, and we examine those houses that were lost forever.

The emphasis isn’t necessarily on the famous country houses, but on those that might have quietly faded into obscurity.

This isn’t an architectural look at country houses; there are sites out there much better qualified to do so. Instead we look at the people who built them, who lived varied and interesting lives and what happened to their properties afterwards.